Once creators understand peoples' expectations, theycan start playing with those expectations in fun and interesting ways.Oculus and PlayStation are impressive in their own right, and are due to catch up,but the Vive comes closest to the promise of VR because it does do roomscale right now and it does it well. There's less abstraction with Vive just because today you can move around and grab things. It's the ability to tap into the intuition of players that makes VR so exciting from a game dev perspective. Granted, all VR right now has significant issues with practicality that make it difficult to recommend to the average person, but Vive and its best gamesgivea more generous peek at what's in store for VR's future. With a little imagination, you can see why that future issoexciting. Gamasutra Road to the IGF: Buy RS Gold Zachtronics' InfinifactoryThis interview is part of our Road to the IGF series. You can find the rest by clicking here.Zachtronics' Infinifactory is a quirky sandbox puzzle game about a human who is abducted by aliens and forced to create elaborate assembly lines. It was released last year in Early Access, and has earned raves for its clever design, and for incorporating player feedback to improve the final product.The game has received an IGF nomination for Excellence inDesign.Zach Barth, the creative director and namesake of Zachtronics,spoke to Gamasutra about the making of the game.What's your background in making games?As a game designer I'm completely selftaught I've had a few jobs in the games industry but they've all been as an engineer. I started designing games in college, continued making games in my spare time while working at Microsoft Infiniminer and SpaceChem, most notably , Runescape Gold and left that to run Zachtronics full time up until this summer Ironclad Tactics, Infinifactory, and TIS100 .What development tools did you use to build Infinifactory?Unity!How much time have you spent working on the game?It took us nine months to get from idea to Early Access, and then another four or five months after that to add the second campaign and make a bunch of balance and usability improvements.How did you come up with the concept?I came up with the core idea years ago, probably a few months after finishing up work on Infiniminer. I avoided it for a long time because I wanted to stay away from anything Minecraftlike.But when we went looking for a new game idea after Ironclad Tactics, we realized that it would be something we could do a good job making and that lots of people would like. And that I totally have the moral highground with Infiniminer and can do whatever I want in the block genre!How did going into Early Access affect your design process?We did it so that we could get more feedback from players and build a game that was more like what they wanted, and I think it was a complete success in that respect. We got a lot of great ideas from watching our fans like the GIF exporter and were able to prioritize for the features they wanted rather than having to guess. We've always paid attention to what our fans say, thersgolds but with Early Access we were able to make a much bigger deal of it.How did you go about turning the concept of using factory architecture into a game design that worked?I watched a lot ofHow It's Madeto get in the mood to design Infinifactory, but all of the mechanics were invented from scratch to create an openended system that resulted in solutions reminiscent of actual factories. I'm a huge proponent of theMDA frameworkwhen designing games, so those principles definitely applied to the design of Infinifactory.Were there many pieces or concepts that didn't make it into the final game, and if so why?